Meeting Yourself: Building Inner Friendship and a New Relationship to Your Energy

A cohort-based learning community

Meeting Yourself: Building Inner Friendship and a New Relationship to Your Energy is a powerful and life-transforming experiential program that will support and enhance your inner and outer growth process.

The course is designed for adults of any age – from recent college graduates to mid-lifers to retirees. It will help you take a quantum leap in claiming the values that inspire your life and applying those values in your home and work life. You will learn skills and acquire tools to build a more life-affirming relationship to yourself and your energy through greater self-care and inner integration. All of these will enhance personal well-being, equanimity, and compassionate action in your life.

The program is based on the best of transformational psychology along with recent insights from neuroscience and the science of well-being. Through this sequence of face-to-face group sessions, online learning, and personal mentoring, you will be able to deepen your connection with such positive, life-enhancing energies as courage, creativity, vitality, increased will, and wisdom.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN AND EXPERIENCE

This course is the culmination of many years of development and refinement. The Personal Transformation and Courage Institute (PTCI) began nearly two decades ago in 2000, and each year we update and supplement the learning experiences in our courses. The program draws from the best of transformational psychology, ancient wisdom traditions of mindfulness and consciousness transformation, along with recent insights from neuroscience and the science of well-being.

There are four learning objectives to the six-month course “Meeting Yourself: Building Inner Friendship and a New Relationship to Your Energy.” These goals can be reached and experienced by each participant – each in his or her own unique way. And from nearly twenty years of our working with small groups, we’ve discovered how much transformative change is possible for sincere seekers even in just six months. The learning objectives are:

1. Enhanced self-awareness that leads to attitudinal and emotional healing

Healing means becoming more whole. And for most of us, the journey toward wholeness means seeing the blocks and congestions of energy that cloud our emotional lives and our thinking – about others and about ourselves. In order to heal these patterns, the course will help you build greater capacity for self-witnessing and clearer self-awareness. That’s why meditation is a central part of this six-month program. You will learn and practice a variety of mindful meditation approaches to expand your contemplative practice repertoire. You will experience body psychology exercises and Energy Constellations to help promote this healing process for your attitudes and emotions.

2. Renewed meaning in your life

Meaning is all about making sense of what’s happening now and seeing a positive way forward. Even though there are days when everything may seem random or arbitrary, learning how to unconditionally befriend oneself can move consciousness to a place of seeing and feeling in “inner order” to everything that is going on. To that end, clarifying and connecting with the values and strengths that inspire your life will bring increased vitality and purpose. You will reconnect with an excitement just to be alive, and an appreciation for the ways in which life brings challenges and opportunities for your growth toward wholeness. As Viktor Frankl wrote, a person who has a sense of meaning in life has the means for dealing with any adversity or trauma or challenge that may arise.

3. Shaping a healthier relationship with yourself

From the course title, the phrase “Building Inner Friendship” speaks directly to what you’ll cultivate over the six months of this course. You’ll see how powerful self-forgiveness can be. You’ll explore the way in which having the courage to “let go of what no longer serves you” can be a pathway to a new sort of relationship with yourself. And you’ll experience ways to nurture a more comprehensive approach to self-care and self-appreciation. Building this kind of inner friendship is the foundation for being able to renew and enhance the relationships you have with family, friends, work colleagues and everyone else whose lives you touch. To “meet yourself” and “befriend yourself unconditionally” opens a place in your heart for compassionate action in the world around you.

4. Enhanced capacity to live a happy and productive life

We all want to be happy, but how do we do it? It has a lot to do with creating greater space and capacity within oneself. Capacity-building and resilience are vital to personal transformation, well-being, and happiness. There are several ways that the course is designed to do just that. Both the conceptual and the experiential learning in the program will build your capacity for healthy will – that is, enhanced ability to make good decisions, to stand up for yourself and have healthy boundaries, and to live in harmony with a Higher Will that provides guidance. The course will also help you build capacity for greater “emotional stamina” – to be able to be present to your growth process even when situations or other people are making you uncomfortable. And we’ll also help you build capacity for seeing and “owning” your gifts, talents, and strengths. These are the ingredients you need to claim in order to live your own soul-purpose and experience the depth of meaning that is possible for each one of us. It’s all about freeing up energy so that you can take steps toward implementing your personal passion in life.

The spiritual ideal – finding and then validating what it is for me, which affords me the opportunity to see just how much my ideal is involved in everything I do, how I look at life, how it is the basis for my spirituality and creativity, how I express myself, and how I relate to others. This, above all else that I have experienced in the PTCI classes, has impacted my life the most.
– Patti Garver

The facilitators were wonderful – excellent research and workshop presentations were clear, meaningful and delivered with kindness and love.
– Barb Donovan

Meeting Yourself: Building Inner Friendship and a New Relationship to Your Energy

Dates and times:

Session 1 is three days: Thursday, March 28 through Saturday, March 30, 2019

Session 2 is three days: Thursday, May 9 through Saturday, May 11, 2019

Session 3 is two days: Thursday, August 22 and Friday, August 23, 2019, at the completion of which you will receive your certificate from PTCI in Personal Transformation Studies.

(10:00 am to 5:30 pm daily)

Location:Fairfax, VA

Tuition: $1,650

Other Details: Maps to the program location, parking options and other logistical information will be sent to participants before the first session. If you have any questions about the program, you can email me directly at MEL@ptcimail.org